And when I say "all" I mean Facebook.
Look, I am your natural social media creature. Blogging, Flickr, Twitter, Email, List-servs; the sharing of my Google Reader, my del.icio.us, my 43 Folders, La La, ffffound, Last.fm.... GOOD LORD. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers...
I've been battling this little urge to get the hell off of Facebook. But I've recently connected with some long-lost friends -- and that reconnection has been so fun. And I do love seeing the extra activity of my online-peeps (dw, flickr, and the rest of you all).
The thing is... I don't mind sharing my online life with my online friends. But it feels weird and highly vulnerable to be doing that on facebook.
Here is why: online people are there because it's their medium. They feel natural there; they are interested in what you have to say. Also, their exposure to you is OPTIONAL. They come cuz they like you, not because your posts/updates/meanderings have been forced down their throats a la an in your face, all-caps-like news feed.
It's funny, even before FB's recent redesign I've felt pretty uncomfortable there. (Don't get me wrong -- I LOVE getting glimpses into what the rest of you are into; it totally warms my heart). For me, it just feels... loud. I feel loud. I hate feeling loud.
Not to mention my Very Traumatic Facebook Experience last Friday where a friend a.) totally misunderstood something that someone else wrote about me in a note and b.) wrote on my wall about said misunderstanding in the most... um... girl-talk-ish way. It wasn't her fault: it really was a misunderstanding (including that she thought posting to a wall was completely private), but man it really left me shattered for a couple hours. (Seriously: hours).
I don't know what this post is other than to say: it's all too much. I'm maxed out. And I feel like I have to re-evaluate the entire thing.
Oh, I miss those simple days of just Flickr and my blog.
Monday, March 23, 2009
It's all too much
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5 comments:
Hi Em.
I agree completely. FB is like standing a crowd and hollering. I don't share news there because I don't know who's there and if I'm being clear enough. I also don't understand FB. How do they make money? What do they do with all that information?? Gives me the willies. I love Flickr.
I see this all as an experiment - Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, weblogs ... whatever. Try out a lot of things, then later trim out the less useful.
Oh heck - out of curiosity, I've played with pretty much everything that came along. Once email, uu-news, ntalk, and IRC were new. Kept email, uu-news is replaced by feed readers, ... and now we have all these other new things.
Facebook and Twitter ... fun sometimes, but a little too ... something.
Flickr was a fun way to find interesting, quirky folk - but go back to old pictures, and you find comment streams scarred by dead identities, and gunked up with junk comments. (Don't get my started on the twinkly animated images transplanted from MySpace.) Is this good, bad, or ... dunno.
Both Flickr and Facebook annoy users when they assert ownership (or censorship). Seems like these conversations in cyberspace should belong to the participants, first.
Eh. Rambling....
Even though I have a Facebook account I don't use it much. I did alter the privacy settings so that nobody could write on my wall, which means if anyone wants to tell you something, they have to use the option to send you a message instead (which then gets sent by email).
I probably disabled just about every other feature while I was there. In fact, the only things left really are the ability to find me and send me a message.
Flickr and a blog is good enough for me, I don't care much for facebook and twitter. There will always be another new social site to explore, but flickr was the first and is still the best in my eyes.
I was so done with web enthusiasms. Still done. I hear Facebook claimed ownership of all your stuff, too. Mmm, lovely.
Snorky set up a MySpace for the band (once we'd stopped gigging!) then dumped it on me to admin. So now we're gigging again he's set up a Facebook, which he's admining and which seems useful for a band, from what he reports at board meetings. I don't even want a membership to take a look, though.
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